Edmund Becket, Lord Grimthorpe was an enthusiastic and ardent devotee of homeopathy, and he wrote to The Times in 1888 to protest against the prejudice of the allopathic physicians in dismissing Kenneth Millican, which resulted in a month long battle of words in The Times, and the whole affair was written up in John Henry Clarke’s Odium medicum and homeopathy.
This prolonged silence with regard to a matter that was so intimately connected with the vital interests of the whole community, was broken by The Times in 1881, at the period when Lord Beaconsfield (who was a patient of homeopath Joseph Kidd) lay dangerously, ill; and again in December, 1887, on account of the high handed action of the committee of a newly established institute called the Queen’s Jubilee Hospital against Kenneth Millican, who had been duly elected its surgeon for throat diseases.
The only grievance the committee of the Jubilee Hospital had against Kenneth Millican was that he belonged to an institution where liberty of opinion on therapeutics was accorded to the medical officers.
The committee of the Jubilee Hospital could not find any fault with the practice of Kenneth Millican, but they, nevertheless expelled him and appointed another in his place. Kenneth Millican brought all action against the committee for wrongful dismissal and got judgment in his favour, which judgment, however, was reversed on appeal.
Edmund Becket, Lord Grimthorpe in a letter to The Times called attention to the bigotry of the committee of the Jubilee Hospital in dismissing an able and competent member of their medical staff for no other cause than his acceptance of a post in another institution where liberty of opinion and practice was allowed to its medical officers.
This conduct he characterised as a flagrant instance of the Odium medicum. A considerable number of representatives of allopathy replied to the letter, protesting that Edmund Becket, Lord Grimthorpe was altogether wrong in attributing to their side and Odium medicum, and unconsciously proving his accusation up to the hilt by the very strong language they used against homeopathy and its adherents.
After the controversy had gone on for ten days the editor of The Times joined in the fray with a leading article in favour of homeopathy.
This elicited an outburst of still more violent denunciations of homeopathy.
When the discussion had raged in the columns of The Times for another fortnight, the editor closed it with another leading article claiming that Edmund Becket, Lord Grimthorpe had been successful in establishing his original contention.
The good example set by The Times in treating of homeopathy with the respect and deference it merited was followed by many newspapers and periodicals, both at home and abroad.
The subject excited great interest, even in Australia, and the beneficial effect that this prolonged discussion had on the proper understanding of homeopathy by the general community is felt even at the present day.
Our facetious friend Punch published (January 28, 1888) a humorous account of the battle of the rival schools, in which the partisan of the globule was represented as having the best of the fray.